Hey everyone, it's Josh. If you're a Fox News watcher, you might think that a career at Google is like attending a steady string of Alexandria Ocasio Cortez rallies. A new standard-bearer for the cause of disaffected conservatives at the company has recently emerged. Kevin Cernekee, a former Google software engineer, told the Wall Street Journal last week he faced relentless bullying for his political views and was eventually fired.
On Monday, President Donald Trump tweeted a Fox Business segment in which Cernekee claimed Google executives "want to use all the power and all the resources that they have to control the flow of information to the public and make sure that Trump loses in 2020."
"Check out what @Google is up to for the 2020 election!" wrote the president.
In response to Cernekee's remarks and the president's tweets, a Google spokeswoman wrote in an email: "The statements made by this disgruntled former employee are absolutely false. We go to great lengths to build our products and enforce our policies in ways that don't take political leanings into account. Distorting results for political purposes would harm our business and go against our mission of providing helpful content to all of our users."
There are reasons to be wary of the Kevin Cernekee-versus-Google story, as told by Kevin Cernekee. But it's worth examining the picture he paints; one in which the main activities at tech companies are undergraduate-level debates on topics like whether it's ever okay to punch a skinhead. Some people think this is what life is like inside Silicon Valley.
Political tensions at Google have certainly been elevated during the Trump era, and could get more so as the 2020 campaign drags on for the next 454 days. But the idea that the company or its employees are using all of their resources to defeat Trump is demonstrably false, as evidenced by employee political spending disclosed to the U.S. Federal Election Commission.
By the numbers, it sure looks like being a Trump supporter at Google is a lonely endeavor. Its employees have made about $2,500 in contributions to the president this year, accounting for far less than one percent of the total political contributions Google employees have made. The president is beating out Marianne Williamson, but trailing Andrew Yang, both in terms of number of donations and total money raised.
The most popular presidential candidate at Google, weirdly, is the one who wants to end Google as we know it. After Elizabeth Warren, Googlers send the most money to Pete Buttigieg and Bernie Sanders. But by far the most common destination of their political contributions isn't a specific candidate or political party. It's Google's own political action committee, Google LLC Netpac. The company's employees have given more to Netpac than they have to all the plausible presidential candidates combined, whether measured by number of contributions or overall money spent.
Netpac exists to gather contributions from its employees and then disburse the funds to candidates who "share Google's common values." The only specific value Google mentions on its website describing its mission is a commitment to an open Internet. It also says it favors officials serving in states where Google has an office. Of the candidates and organizations it has given at least $5,000 this year, 20 are associated with Democrats and 19 are associated with the GOP, a pattern in line with its even-handed spending since its inception in 2006. The Republican groups it has given to so far in 2019 include the National Republican Senate Committee, which runs ads featuring President Trump, and Mitch McConnell's Bluegrass Committee, which has cut checks to Marsha Blackburn, Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley, Google's most vociferous Republican critics.
That doesn't take all political activity into account. The $500,000 that Netpac has doled out this year is dwarfed by the $6.7 million Alphabet, Google's parent company, has spent on lobbying over the same period.
None of this suggests that Google's employee base isn't liberal. But it is a reminder that most software engineers didn't set out to become political activists. When they do decide to make political contributions, the most common way they do so is basically by tithing to the cause of Google as an institution. And that institution's main political objective isn't pushing a particular ideology. It's greasing the wheels.—Joshua Brustein
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